Cycle Time

Cycle Time represents the time a work item (Defect/feature) took to get completed, from the time it was prioritized and pushed to the board. Cycle Time is frequently compared and associated with Lead Time, which records the time when the request to work on that work item is placed till it is delivered. So, Cycle time, which is a part of the overall Lead Time, is more of a measure of process capability, where is the Lead Time is what customers see, and matters to them.

Filtering the Data Set

Navigate to Project > ESP Module, and then select the Lane and enter the start and end date for which you want to plot the chart.

The chart is plotted based on the card count as Unit of Measurement (UoM) in the CFD analytics page.

You can perform any of these activities to further refine your search and narrow down the scope of the chart:

Select any of these attributes: like Item Type, Priority, Size, or Class of Service to plot the chart. You can further refine your filter by selecting particular attribute values. For example, if you have selected ItemType as filtering attribute, then you can further select Change Request and Defect to narrow down the scope of the chart.

You can also define the Start and End column to further filter your data on the chart.

As you apply any of these filters, the chart will be refreshed and rendered automatically.

While calculating Cycle Time, the chart takes into account all the cards ranging between the start and end column that you specify in the analytics page, which might include:

Cards entered or exited the Done Column Type

Cards archived from any column beyond (to the right) the Done Column Type

Reading the Diagram

In the CT analytics page, the cycle time chart is placed at the extreme below. The cycle time is rendered in the range of 0 – 100 days on Y-axis and the entire selected date range is shown in X-axis. The 3 horizontal dotted lines (bottom to top) on the chart represents 1st quartile, median, and 3rd quartile.You can further specify the date range in this chart by dragging the slider from both the sides and. In the image 1, the date range selected is 26 Sep to 26 Nov.

Based on the date range, as mentioned in step 1, the second last chart (image 2) renders how various cards of the concerned Kanban board are placed throughout the cycle time range, as shown in Y-axis.

The box-plot divides the cycle time range into quartile 1, Median and Quartile 3, and shows the cards (colored dots) that fall into or out of this range.

Each dot represents a card and the color defines its card type, as defined in the board policy. Hovering over any dot will show the card id and the cycle time.

The span between the quartile 1 and 3 is called Interquartile Range or IQR. Generally, IQR is calculated as 1.35 ?where ? is the standard deviation.

Any card that falls beyond 3×IQR or more above the third quartile or 3×IQR or more below the first quartile, is called Outlier. In the image 2, the card almost having 120-days cycle time, is an outlier.

The bar chart, as shown in image 3, shows the relation between the number of cards and average cycle time. For example, 3 cards as highlighted in the image, has consumed on average 60 days to complete, where there is 1 card that also has consumed almost 120 days (the outlier).

The gauge or speedometer chart (image 4) points out how coefficient is the ratio between average cycle time and standard deviation for the selected date range (image 1). The coefficient is derived by dividing Deviation by Average. Any coefficient rate which is 1.28 or below is acceptable in the project. Anything beyond 1.28 goes into Red and needs to introspection.

Interpreting the Diagram

You can use the Cycle Time chart to monitor the overall status of the cycle time across card types during the specified date range. For example, in image 2, most of the cards are in between the 3rd Quartile and 1st Quartile. Moreover, many of them are close to the median, and very few are in the outlier zone.

Additionally, the coefficient of variance is gauged under 1.25, and the bar chart shows not much of variance in the average cycle time for the number of cards.
So, it can be assumed that the project has been in a better shape during that time range.